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John Carpenter Releases Cathedral Graphic Novel With Companion Album

Pairing a 132-page Los Angeles-set horror book with a 14-track album mapped to each chapter, the project delivers a film-like audio-visual experience produced outside the studio system.

Overview

  • The graphic novel Cathedral, published by Storm King Comics, became available Wednesday and runs 132 pages set in downtown Los Angeles.
  • A 14-track companion album by John Carpenter, his son Cody Carpenter and his godson Daniel Davies is scheduled for release on Sacred Bones Records on Aug. 7 and links each track to a chapter of the book.
  • Carpenter says the story began as a nightmare about an abandoned cathedral and that he co-wrote the book with Sandy King and Sean Sobczak while Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna handled the main artwork.
  • The launch includes multiple collector-focused editions with exclusive covers from Francesco Francavilla, Luis Guaragna with Sian Mandrake, Leonardo Colapietro and Jason Shawn Alexander, and the book is listed at mainstream retailers.
  • Carpenter frames Cathedral as a lower-cost, artist-driven way to achieve a movie-like work outside corporate filmmaking, continuing his long practice of scoring his own projects and raising questions about how creators may use music and comics to bypass studio economics.